


Heaven's Not Far Away (and I'm not gonna leave you here)

by Irelando



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: (slow for me anyway), (think pac rim canon but a little bit slower), Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, F/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Slow Burn, tags will update with each chapter!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-09
Updated: 2017-07-03
Packaged: 2018-10-29 18:53:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 15,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10859979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Irelando/pseuds/Irelando
Summary: On July 10, 2017,Partisan Rebeldeploys for the first time from the Anchorage Shatterdome. Three months later, Jyn Erso kills her first kaiju in Los Angeles. She’s just barely eighteen years old.(aka: Rogue One Pacific Rim AU. On hiatus for the moment, sorry to say!)





	1. Partisan Rebel

**Author's Note:**

> So... remember that Pacific Rim AU [drabble](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10709373) I did for Rebelcaptain week? If you liked that, you've come to the right place. 
> 
> Many many thanks to my betas, [imsfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire) and [FiKate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FiKate/pseuds/FiKate)! 
> 
> Title taken from "Let the Sparks Fly" by Thousand Foot Krutch.

Jyn Erso is fourteen years old when the world turns on its head.

She sits on the floor in front of the TV, safe in her family flat in London, her parents silent on the couch behind her, and watches a monster tear its way through San Francisco. Long after the sun sets and her parents retire, murmuring to each other, to their beds, Jyn watches the destruction.

In the days after the kaiju is finally brought down, the story slowly comes out.

 _It came from the Pacific_ , the BBC says. The UK breathes a tentative sigh of relief, secure in the knowledge that the country is far from the frontlines.

 _Casualties number in the tens of thousands,_ the BBC says. The world offers its sympathy. Behind closed doors, a hundred and ninety five governments thank whatever gods they believe in that it didn’t happen to them.

 _According to our top scientists, this is a one-time event,_  the BBC says. Jyn doesn’t believe it for an instant.

They move to San Francisco. Her father has never been able to resist a new scientific frontier, and her mother has never been able to resist her father’s passions. Galen disappears into the lab, bent on solving the question of where the kaiju came from. Lyra joins in the relief efforts, working to undo the damage wrought by Trespasser and by the force it took to stop it.

Jyn gets used to being alone. She spends afternoons wandering the city, watches the people of San Francisco struggle to rebuild. She helps where she can, but there’s a part of her that knows she’s an outsider.  

Eight months later, it happens again. The world reels. The Ersos move to the Philippines.

“I’m sorry, Jyn,” Galen says as their plane lifts off. “You have to understand; we need to find out where these things are coming from.”

Jyn watches the city recede below them, the ground quite literally taken out from under her for the second time in a year, and says nothing.

They’ve barely settled in when the third kaiju hits Mexico. By the time the fourth hits Sydney, the citizens of the world have stopped being surprised and started looking for ways to fight back.

The first time Jyn sees Sydney Opera House outside of photos is with half its iconic roof torn away.

And then Lyra gets sick.

They knew the dangers of kaiju blood. After those first few deaths, anyone working in one of the disaster zones went properly shielded with the best protective equipment humanity could come up with. As it turns out, that wasn’t enough.

Jyn drives her mother to the hospital for appointments, week after week. They fly all over Australia, even back to London a couple of times, looking for anyone who can help.

Galen buries himself in his work.

“She needs you,” Jyn says as he’s walking out the door one morning.

Galen pauses. The look he gives her over his shoulder is preoccupied, but even so, she can see the guilt in his eyes. “We need to understand the kaiju,” he says. “Krennic and I—we’re so close. If we can get a grasp on their biology, maybe we can…”

“She’s dying,” Jyn forces out past the lump in her throat.

Galen flinches, rocks back on his heels. “Then I have to work faster,” he says. The door swings shut behind him.

After that, he doesn’t even come home anymore, spending all his time in the lab searching desperately for a cure.

“It’s the only thing he knows how to do,” Lyra says from her hospital bed, reaching out to put a hand over Jyn’s.

 _It’s not good enough,_  Jyn roars inside her own head. She says nothing, swallows the words down and adds them to the fire burning deep inside her.

On January 1st, 2015, Lyra Erso dies.

Galen nearly misses the funeral. He stands, dry eyed, staring at her grave like he’s expecting to wake up any moment. Jyn clenches her hands, her teeth, her throat, anything to keep from screaming at him. Her mother deserves better than for the two people she loved most in the world to get into a fight over her grave.

When it’s over, he leaves. Jyn goes home to a house that echoes.

In May, she receives a letter informing her that she’s been officially expelled from her high school. Considering she hasn’t attended since October, she’s surprised it took them this long. She puts the letter on her father’s side of her parents’ bed, unused in months, and leaves the house with nothing but the clothes on her back and her mother’s favorite crystal pendant around her neck.

“What do you mean, I’m not old enough?” she growls across the table at the Jaeger Program recruiter. “Do you need pilots or don’t you?”

“We need pilots  _of age_ ,” the man says coolly. “Come back in two years.” His calm wavers enough for her to see the exhaustion and fear underneath. “I’m sure we’ll still need pilots then.”

Jyn clenches her fists, narrowly clamping down on the urge to see if demonstrating her willingness to punch will convince them to break the rules. She’s not at all sure she’ll last two years in this shell-shocked city, watching helpless and alone as the kaiju wreck the world.

She’s halfway down the block when she realizes through the haze of fury that someone’s following her. Good. She’s itching for a fight.

She whirls, and finds a middle-aged black man studying her. She vaguely recognizes him from the waiting room at the recruitment office. “Please tell me you’re here to mug me,” she snarls, “Because I could really use a brawl.”

He lets that sit for a moment, then nods. “I can tell.” He folds his arms across his chest, and Jyn notices the glint of a dog tag chain around his neck. He studies her, and Jyn gets the uncomfortable feeling that he can see past her anger to the dark, sucking grief underneath. “Is this really what you want?”

“Yes,” Jyn says. “I don’t have anything else. And I owe the kaiju a fight.”

“Rage is as good a reason as any,” he says. “You’ll have to learn to control it.”

“Just show me where to point it,” she says. “And I’ll show you what I can do.”

Saw Gerrera, as it turns out, is a veteran brought in to help shape the Jaeger program. Unlike the recruiter, he doesn’t seem to mind that Jyn is underage. Jyn doesn’t know what magic he works with the paperwork, and she doesn’t care; all that matters is that less than a week after her visit to the recruitment office, she’s on a plane headed for Alaska.

The Jaeger Academy is brutal. It demands the very best of its students, because they have to be the very best of humanity. Jyn pushes her loss and her grief way down inside her, until even she’s not sure she could find it anymore, turns her rage into armor and  _refuses_  to be crushed under the weight.

The fighting comes easily to her. It gives the anger, so long pent up inside, a place to go. It’s the psych evals that trip her up; they ask questions about her family, about her mother’s death. About her father.

“I doubt he’s even noticed I’m gone,” Jyn bites out. The psychologist nods, making a note on her sheet.

To her surprise, they don’t ask her not to be angry. They don’t ask her not to grieve. Then again, if they rejected any pilot who was angry, any pilot who had lost something, they wouldn’t have anybody left. Instead, they teach her to channel it, to aim herself in the right direction so the inevitable explosion reaches its intended target.

She watches in frustration as other candidates get paired up, or drummed out. She has a few good fights, but no one clicks with her on the Combat Room mat. She spends months in limbo, waiting for the right person to come along who can keep up. And then, suddenly, she’s cleared for the next step.

She shows up to her first day of Pons training to find Saw Gerrera waiting for her. Their eyes meet, and something in the back of her brain snaps into place.

In the Drift, behind Saw’s quiet eyes, she finds a mirror of her own rage and pain and loss. She sees a young girl tagging along after Saw, thirty years of history in the blink of an eye. _Steela_. She sees a woman, laugh lines around her eyes and mouth, dying of kaiju blood exposure in that first brutal attack on San Francisco.

She doesn’t know what Saw sees, but when they come out of the Drift, the technicians are muttering amongst themselves.

 _94% synchronicity_ , she’s told. More than enough to be a viable pilot pair.

From there on, they train together. Saw is the whetstone to her knife, a wall she can beat herself against until she grows strong enough to break through. He’s able to rein in her anger because he understands it deeply; he takes her impulsive, instinctive fighting ability and shapes it into something far more powerful.

On July 10, 2017,  _Partisan Rebel_ deploys for the first time from the Anchorage Shatterdome. Three months later, Jyn Erso kills her first kaiju in Los Angeles. She’s just barely eighteen years old.

The satisfaction of that kill is enough, for a while. Right about when she starts to get antsy,  _Partisan Rebel_  is deployed again, this time to Guatemala. And then to San Diego.

Not long after that, the truth of Jyn’s age comes out. By then it’s too late, but that doesn’t stop certain factions from fussing about it. “She’s reckless,” they say. “Doesn’t follow protocol, doesn’t even follow orders. She went through the program too young. She has no control.”

“She gets results,” is the only counter Saw needs. 

In 2020, their luck runs out.

Jyn staggers back to shore with the entire 2000-ton weight (less one arm) of _Partisan Rebel_ dragging her mind down into the ragged, bleeding hole where Saw once was.

It’s a month before she claws her way back out, reconnects mind to body and realizes she survived. A month of people arguing over her head; one side says she was reckless, she was stupid, she got her more experienced (more valuable) partner killed. The other insists that they lasted longer than anyone expected, and isn’t it amazing that Jyn piloted a Jaeger by herself? The second to ever manage it, barely out of her teens. Once the news gets out that Jyn’s awake, the interview invitations come hard and fast.

Pan Pacific Defense Corps doesn’t even give her the chance to tell the reporters where to shove it. The psych evaluations are long and merciless, asking again and again: _Why did you go after that ship? Were a dozen lives really worth it?_

“ _Yes!_ ” Jyn finally spits, glaring at the soft-spoken woman across the table from her. “We saved them, didn’t we? I killed the damn thing. We only had one—“ she chokes, forces her way through it, “one casualty. What more do you want from me?”

The shrink doesn’t answer, pen scratching away on her pad of paper.

That night, she reaches for the Drift harder than ever. It _hurts_ , but she would swear she can feel Saw, just beyond the edge of her mind. If she could only get back there—

But they’re never going to let her back in a Jaeger, she realizes, with a clarity that cuts through the pain and the wanting, right down to the truth.

She quits the very next day. They let her go. In one of the universe’s cruel, ironic echoes, she leaves the Shatterdome with nothing but the clothes on her back and her mother’s pendant around her neck.

The difference is, this time, she has no idea where to go.


	2. The Wall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He takes a deep breath. “I need a pilot.”

Jyn loses time.

It’s not surprising. She’s upright, sure, walking and talking and apparently functional, but the gaping rent in her mind is a constant threat. A single misstep and she’d be dragged down again. And, somewhere deep inside her, she’s not at all sure she’d be able to crawl back out a second time. Some nights, when she wakes with her throat raw and the imprints of her own fingernails in her palms, she finds herself wondering if she’d find Saw in there. If maybe, down below the aching and the loss and the pain, she’d find peace.

Years slide by. Looking back, Jyn’s never sure what she did to survive. All she knows is this:

She fights. With everything she has, she fights, not because she has anything in particular to live for but because it’s the only thing she knows how to do. She grits her teeth against the siren call of the dark out of sheer, stubborn will. She keeps putting one foot in front of the other.

Headlines on the papers in the corner store announce plans to build a giant wall around the Pacific rim to keep the kaiju out. It’s the first time Jyn laughs since Knifehead. Any Jaeger pilot could tell them the Wall is a waste of time. Nothing that can’t fight back stands a chance against the horrors that come out of the Breach.

Still, the laughter changes something. Nothing so abrupt as flipping a light switch, or so profound as the skies clearing of clouds. It’s small, just a spark, a tiny light in the darkness.

It’s just enough for Jyn to remember that the reason she fights is that she’s _angry_.

The kaiju keep coming. Jaegers keep fighting. Pilots keep dying. Jyn wonders if the survivors get the same treatment she did. Sometimes she really, really wants them to.

When Jyn hears that construction is beginning on the Wall in Sitka, Alaska, she goes, because it feels like the farthest place in the world from the Jaeger Program.

The foreman asks who’s not afraid of heights. Jyn raises her hand.

Sitka is a miserable place, bitterly cold and constantly damp. Construction on the Wall never really stops; even at night, the sparking of welders and the shriek of metal being cut and bent rings through the air. The Wall slowly grows. Jyn wonders whether her fellow builders actually believe the shit the politicians are spewing, or if they just don’t have anywhere else to go, either. She doesn’t ask.

One day, working at the highest point of the Wall, Jyn looks up and feels a sudden tug in her gut, a flash of sense-memory. The ocean stretching out before her looks just like it did from the Conn-Pod. For an instant, she can feel Saw’s mind in her own, armor sheathing her skin, the incredible power of _Partisan Rebel_ beneath her.

She snaps back to herself a second later, head throbbing. The empty hole in her mind calls to her, promising a return to the glory days. She swallows, holding the I-beam beside her tight, and rides it out.

An hour after that, it happens again. But this time, it hurts a little less.

The next day, the foreman says, “Sorry, girl. You’re too late; we’re all out of food ration cards for the day.”

She looks up at him and says, voice rusty from disuse, “I’ll work anyway.”

By the time she finds a word for what she discovers atop the Wall, the wound in her mind has finally scabbed over. The ragged edges are no longer so ragged. She doesn’t think it’ll ever feel less empty, not when she still remembers what it felt like to have another’s mind twined with her own, to be _understood_ on so profound a level she’ll never be able to explain it. But it doesn’t hurt so much anymore.

 _Peace_. Imperfect. Incomplete. But peace, all the same.

Beggars can’t be choosers. She’ll take it.

—

Jyn doesn’t have to join the crowd of workers around the tiny TV to hear what the news reports say.

_The Wall has failed. Sydney is under attack._

Mutavore tears through it like a hot knife through butter. Jyn snorts into her meagre meal.

“Something funny?” one of the other workers asks.

Jyn looks up. He’s a burly guy, biceps the size of her head, his face smudged with grease. She could wipe the floor with him. But his hands are shaking, his eyes wide and a little wild.

She shrugs and nods to the TV. “If you’re surprised by that,” she says, into a room gone suddenly quiet, “You weren’t paying attention.”

A murmur sweeps through the crowd. Jyn gets up, leaving what remains of her food on the table, and leaves before anyone decides to take exception to the truth.

She’s halfway back to the Wall before she notices the way her heart is pounding against her ribs, the cold feeling in her stomach. _Who cares?_ she snarls, angry at her own reaction. _They defunded the Jaeger Program. They had to see what was coming._

“Miss Erso,” a voice calls from behind her.

Jyn stiffens. The work crews here are anonymous, workers paid probably illegally with food rations rather than real wages. She’s been very careful not to tell anyone her name.

She turns.

He couldn’t look more out of place if he tried, his military coat and light hair carefully clean in a place where everything else was smeared with oil and grease. He’s so far out of context, it takes a moment before Jyn recognizes him.

Then she does, and hot rage replaces the sick fear inside her. She sneers. “Major Draven. Or did they demote you after your epic cock-up in Anchorage?”

He shakes his head. “It’s General now, actually.”

Jyn raises an eyebrow. “Impressive,” she says, injecting as much scorn as possible into her words. She’d never liked Draven—too by the book by half—but she’d respected him. Until Saw died, and he was nowhere to be found.

He looks at her for a long moment. Jyn’s rage flickers, bereft of a target to latch onto. “Why are you here?” she demands finally.

He takes a deep breath. “I need a pilot.”

Jyn’s mind goes terrifyingly blank for a split second. “Excuse me?” she manages.

“I need a pilot,” Draven repeats.

Jyn gropes for a moment. As always, her anger provides an anchor. “Didn’t you read the discharge papers?” she asks. She had, before she’d torn them to shreds and dumped them in the harbor. “Dishonorable. Ineligible for re-enlistment. Volatile, impulsive, _broken_.” That last was from her final psych eval: _We fear that Jyn Erso’s mind may be broken beyond repair._ It hurt all the more because Jyn wasn’t sure they were wrong.

For an instant, Jyn thinks she catches a hint of sympathy in Draven’s eyes. It only stokes the raging inferno inside her. Then he covers it, drawing himself up. “I won’t lie to you,” he says. “We are out of options.”

Jyn clenches her teeth against a half-dozen separate cutting responses to that. “So train yourself a new one,” she says finally.

“We don’t have the time,” he says.

Slowly, reluctantly, the fire gives way to curiosity. “What do you mean?”

“Things are coming to a breaking point. The failure of the Anti-Kaiju Wall—“ Jyn snorts, and Draven’s mouth quirks just slightly—“has reminded the public of the validity of the Jaeger Program.”

“I thought the Jaeger Program was dead,” Jyn says, and surprises herself with the pang of grief that goes through her. Another family, lost.

“Not quite,” Draven says. He steps forward. “If we don’t move soon, we give up what little chance we have. We need someone with experience. We need _you_ , Miss Erso.”

Jyn looks at him for a long time. How much must it have hurt, she wonders, to swallow down his pride and come here to ask for her help? And how desperate must he be?

Her chest aches. She imagines for a moment the empty space in her mind _filled_ , and her knees go weak. It’ll hurt, no doubt about that, but she’s no stranger to pain.

Draven apparently mistakes her silence for lack of conviction, because he takes another step towards her, his eyes intent. “One way or another, the end is coming _soon_ ,” he says. “Where do you want to be when it does?”

Jyn grins.


	3. Shatterdome, Part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A spark of interest lights in those eyes. “I’ve read a lot about you.”

Right up until the moment the Hong Kong Shatterdome materializes out of the darkness and rain outside the helicopter’s window, Jyn’s not at all sure she’s made the right choice. The emptiness in her mind aches with a confusing mix of nostalgia and guilt; even as half of her longs for the Drift, the other half clings to those last, painful memories of Saw.

If she Drifts with someone else, will she forget him?

And then the bulk of the Shatterdome looms, and it looks like the home she was never sure she’d found. Jyn lets out a shaky breath, watching it fog across the window.

The helipad is bustling with activity. Glowing orange tanks with what look like kaiju parts roll slowly across towards the Shatterdome doors, shepherded by a few yelling men. Faceless shapes in raincoats bustle back and forth. The door opens, and that gust of rain brings with it the scent of oil and gas, metal and seawater. Jyn closes her eyes and breathes deep.

She knew Shatterdomes were all built to look the same. She hadn’t known until now that they smelled the same, too.

Jyn tries to take it all in as she climbs out of the helicopter. Some part of her still expects this to be pulled out from under her feet, for Draven to change his mind and turn this into a cruel joke. If that happens, she’ll want the memory to tide her over until the end comes.

And then the man waiting for them on the helipad raises his umbrella, producing a second from under his military-style leather jacket to hand to her. Her eyes catch on his.

She takes him in. Face schooled into an unreadable, neutral mask. Facial hair that she’d have to call scruff if it weren’t so neatly clipped. Dark eyes that study her just as carefully as she’s studying him.

He’s still holding out the umbrella. Draven takes it like it was intended for him, opens it, and hands it to Jyn. It’s enough to snap her out of it.

“This is Captain Cassian Andor, one of our best,” Draven says. Jyn hears a note of personal pride in his tone; she doesn’t look to see if it’s reflected on his face. “He’s also heading up the restoration program, as well as choosing your copilot candidates.”

Cassian breaks eye contact first, his gaze flickering over to Draven. “ _No es como la había imaginado_ ,” he says quietly, almost sheepishly.

_Ha,_ Jyn thinks _. Nice try_. “Better or worse?”

His eyes widen a little. “Ah…” He considers. “I apologize, Miss Erso.”

“Jyn,” she says.

“Jyn,” he echoes, agreeably enough. A spark of interest lights in those eyes. “I’ve read a lot about you.”

She raises an eyebrow.

Just before the elevator starts its descent into the Shatterdome, a voice calls out, “Please, hold the elevator!”

Jyn sticks her arm into the door, and three sopping wet men pile on. “Thank you,” one says as he goes by, and Jyn notes his limp and the cane clutched in one hand.

As the men shuck off their soaked raincoats, Jyn studies them in the orange light from the kaiju tanks. One towers over the others, spindly and dark-skinned, his head shaved so close to the scalp that it shines. Next to him is the one with the cane, a little on the portly side, with a cloud of wispy blonde hair under his hood.

The last is even shorter than Jyn herself (which is impressive), and reveals a shock of bright blue hair and sleeves of colorful tattoos as he pulls off his coat.

The tallest man looks over his companion’s head at her. “You are Jyn Erso, are you not?” he asks, in a perfect RP accent.

“I am,” Jyn says. “Who are you?”

“This is our research division,” Draven says, watching the exchange with a hint of amusement around his eyes. He nods to the tallest man. “Doctor Kay Tuesso, specializing in mathematics and probability.”

The shortest man suddenly pushes at Jyn’s arm, nudging her further away from the kaiju tanks. His fingers fly in what she’s pretty sure is ASL. “Uh…”

“Please excuse Artoo,” the middle man says, using the residual rainwater to smooth his hair back out of his face. “He can be a bit overzealous with his samples.”

“Doctor Deetu is an expert in kaiju biology,” Draven puts in.

Jyn raises an eyebrow, but she backs obligingly away from the tanks. “Okay.”

“I am Cee Threepio,” the blonde man explains.“Artoo’s assistant and interpreter.”

“More like babysitter,” Kay mutters.

Jyn catches a better glimpse of one of the tattoos, and frowns. “Are those kaiju?”

Artoo’s face lights up, his signing going from irritated to excited in a heartbeat.

“I’m afraid so,” Threepio says. “He’s a bit of an enthusiast.”

“He’s a kaiju groupie,” Kay corrects.

Artoo frowns and turns, signing something at Kay.

“You most certainly are,” the taller man says.

Then the doors open. Jyn follows Draven and Cassian out of the elevator gladly, as the bickering behind them rises in volume. “That’s your research division?”

Draven glances over his shoulder. “Things have changed, Miss Erso. The Jaeger Program’s not dead… but it isn’t what it once was. We’re no longer an army.” He turns to tap a code into a keypad on the wall.

“No?” Jyn asks.

Cassian turns as the doors open, giving Jyn her first glimpse at the Shatterdome proper. “Welcome to the Resistance.”

Jyn raises an eyebrow at that, but she can’t keep her eyes off the slowly opening doors. She brushes past Draven and Cassian to step into the Shatterdome.

The sounds of metalworking ring over the crowd. A sharp metallic tang teases at Jyn’s nose. The Wall was busy, but not like this; where the builders kept their heads down and their mouths shut, here voices ring out over the crowd in a dozen different languages. People walk with purpose, crossing back and forth without ever seeming to get in each other’s way. In the distance, the enormous figures of Jaegers loom. 

Jyn closes her eyes. All at once, the last five years just melt away. It’s like coming home, and like she never left at all. 

There’s one thing different, though; something ticking, deep and regular. She opens her eyes, and immediately spots the giant countdown clock over the doors. 

“The War Clock,” Draven says, coming up beside her. “Reset after every kaiju attack.”

Jyn eyes it. “That’s a bit grim.”

Draven nods. “That’s half the point.” He starts to move again. Jyn has to hustle a little to keep up with his longer strides, though she quickly finds a rhythm that doesn’t make it look like she’s trying too hard. 

Now that the initial wash of sensation is over, Jyn can see the empty bays where Jaegers would have once stood. “How many Jaegers are left?” she asks. She’s not sure she wants to know the answer, but she needs to.

Draven glances at her. “Four,” he says.

Jyn can’t keep her dismay from showing on her face. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Draven confirms. “This is all that’s left.”

Cassian’s watching her. Jyn struggles to get her reaction under control. “I didn’t realize it was this bad,” she says. For whose benefit, she’s not quite sure. 

“It’s bad,” Cassian says quietly. 

After a moment, Draven indicates the nearest of the Jaegers. “ _Desert Guardian_. China. One of the greats.”

Though she’d never admit it, Jyn’s grateful for the subject change. She nods. “I’ve heard. One of the pilots is blind, right?”

“Chirrut Îmwe,” Cassian says, and for the first time, he cracks a slight smile. “Doesn’t slow him down any.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Draven agrees. “He and Baze Malbus have defended Hong Kong seven times.”

Jyn whistles. As they pass, she catches a glimpse of the pair in question; a burly man (who must be Baze) fiddling with the innards of a rifle, with Chirrut perched on a crate beside him cracking jokes to the techs working on the Jaeger.

She turns forward again, to the next Jaeger, and can’t help but wrinkle her nose. “What’s that relic?”

“ _Millennium Falcon_ ,” Draven says, the corner of his mouth twitching upwards. “Don’t let Solo hear you call it that, or you’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Last of the Mark Ones,” Cassian says. “The first to have a multi-national pilot team.”

“Right,” Jyn says, “I remember hearing about that. American-Russian, right?”

Draven nods. “Make no mistake, Miss Erso. The _Falcon_ is a powerhouse.”

At the _Falcon_ ’s feet, Jyn spots two figures in armor, maybe freshly back from a test run. One towers over the other. As they pass nearby, she would swear she can hear them bickering, one in English, one in Russian. 

Jyn’s little group rounds a corner to the final Jaeger. She pauses to take it in; even after five years out of the Rangers, she can tell that this one’s in a class all its own. She can’t help but admire it. 

“ _Tantive Endeavor_ ,” Cassian says. Jyn blinks and glances at him, and only then notices that Draven didn’t stop when she did, instead continuing forward to speak with a vaguely familiar man in casual pilot wear. “The first and last of the Mark Fives,” Cassian continues, open admiration in his voice. 

Draven glances back over his shoulder at them. Cassian immediately starts moving; Jyn follows a little more cautiously. 

“Miss Erso,” Draven says as she comes up, “This is Bail Organa.”

“I remember.” Jyn offers a hand to shake, feeling a small smile quirk at her mouth. “We fought together in Manila.” They’d spoken very little, only to call out to each other over comms, but even so this man before her is the closest thing she’s found to a friend so far.

“That we did,” Bail says, smiling in return. He grips her hand. “It’s good to have you back. I’m sorry about your partner.”

A sharp pain shoots through Jyn’s chest, a knot closing up her throat. She nods. 

“Bail and his daughter will be running point in the _Tantive_ ,” Draven says. Jyn glances past him to see a woman, maybe a little younger than her, watching the crane team currently bringing the Jaeger in with her hands on her hips. 

“Wait,” Jyn says. “Running point on what? What exactly is your plan here?”

Draven turns to regard her. “We’re going after the Breach.”

Jyn folds her arms. “How?”

“Thermonuclear warhead,” he says. “ _Tantive_ ’s job is to get it into the breach. Your job, along with the _Falcon_ and _Guardian_ , is to run defense for them.”

Jyn considers asking where the hell they got that kind of firepower, but she gets the distinct sense that she only gets so many questions before Draven’s going to clam up, and she doesn’t honestly care where it came from. “We’ve gone after the Breach before,” she says. “It doesn’t work.”

But apparently she’s run out of questions already. Draven’s expression cools. “Let me worry about that, Miss Erso,” he says. She’s really beginning to hate the way he says ‘miss’. “You just worry about finding the right copilot. Bail?”

Organa nods to Jyn politely and falls into step with Draven, the two men heading across the Shatterdome floor. Safe behind his back, Jyn lets her lip curl in frustration. 

And then realizes that she’s not actually alone. “I’ll show you to your Jaeger,” Cassian says, his expression unreadable. 

Jyn glances after Draven and Organa again, but the mention of her Jaeger - _her_ Jaeger - is the perfect bait. “Fine,” she says, and follows him away. 

Cassian leads her into a section of the complex away from the other bays. Judging by the increased bustle and the rising echo of welders around them, she’s guessing it’s more of a construction/testing area. Are they building a new Jaeger? But then why would Draven go to the trouble of digging her out of Sitka?

And then they round the corner. Jyn gets her first glimpse of the Jaeger, and gets slammed with a wave of déjà vu so strong it takes her breath away. 

_“That’s her,” Saw says from beside her, an unfamiliar shine in his eyes. “That’s our Jaeger.”_

_Jyn looks up, and up, and up. Her hands itch to pilot it. Her mind reaches instinctively for Saw’s, never mind that they aren’t set up to Drift. “What’s her name?”_

_Saw shakes his head. “She doesn’t have one,” he says, “Not yet. Do you want to name her?”_

_Jyn looks at him, startled. “Me?”_

_He nods._

_She mulls that over. “We’re going to pilot her together,” she says eventually. “We should name her together.”_

_Saw smiles._

“ _Partisan Rebel_ ,” Jyn breathes. She finds herself at the rail, hands gripping it tightly as her gaze roves up and down the Jaeger’s body. Her eyes return over and over to the left arm. “She looks like new.”

“Better than new,” Cassian says from behind her. “She’s been refitted. One of a kind.”

Jyn remembers the way _Partisan_ felt underneath her, and thinks, _She always was_.

“Jyn Erso?” a voice says from behind her. “Is that you?”

She shakes off her reverie and turns to find a reedy, brown-skinned man with a nervous smile. It takes a moment to click. “Bodhi?”

His smile solidifies. “It’s good to have you back. When you left, I thought…” he pauses, expression flickering. “Well. It’s good to see you.”

Jyn blinks, a little uncertain. Bodhi was the closest thing she’d had to a friend once, besides Saw, but she’d never thought he might feel the same way. He was the voice on the other end of the line. She had resented him at first, as the one who generally relayed orders from Draven, but after hearing the genuine triumph in his voice after _Partisan Rebel_ ’s first kill, she’d warmed up quickly. 

After Anchorage, he’d been the only one besides the doctors who came to check up on her. He’d been the only one who knew Saw even half as well as she did, and who seemed to really care that he was gone. 

She smiles, slowly. “It’s good to see you, too,” she says, and means it.

\--

An hour later, Cassian shows her to her room. It’s much like the one she had before, in Anchorage, except this time, there’s only one bed. 

It shouldn’t be a surprise, but the sight of that one lonely cot makes her stomach sink. 

“So, what’s your deal?” she asks, turning away from the bed to glance back at Cassian. “I thought Draven liked you, but he left you to walk me around.” She studies him. “Are you a pilot?”

“I’ve been through the training.” 

Jyn raises an eyebrow. “Really? What’s your score?”

His chest puffs out, just a little bit. “Fifty one drops. Fifty one kills.”

She whistles. “That’s impressive. Guess I’ll see you on the mat tomorrow, huh?” When he doesn’t answer, she presses, “Won’t I?”

“I’m not one of the pilot candidates,” he says stiffly. 

Jyn frowns. If they’re as hard-pressed for pilots as they must be to pull her in, then-- “Why not?”

“The General has his reasons.”

Jyn’s mouth twists. “Doesn’t he always,” she says, making no attempt to keep the strain of bitterness out of her tone. 

Cassian looks at her for a long moment. “I think you’ll find the candidates I’ve chosen sufficient,” he says eventually. “I’ve studied your technique.”

“Yeah?” Jyn says. “Anything you want to share?”

He considers. “You have talent,” he says, carefully, “And you’re lucky. But you’re reckless, too. You don’t follow orders. You don’t know when to back down. I’m not sure you’re the right pilot for this mission.”

Well, she did ask for his opinion. “Look. Have you ever been in the field? Not in a sim, in an actual fight?”

Cassian’s lips thin.

_Ooh. Sore spot._

“No,” he admits after a moment. 

“Right, well. When you do,” she says, noting the way his brow smooths slightly at her choice of words, “You’ll understand. You do what you have to do.”

His mouth twitches.

“What?” she asks. 

He mulls it over. “That sounds like an excuse to me.”

Jyn’s temper flares. Who is he to judge her, when he doesn’t know what it’s like? 

“Maybe,” she says, when she’s sure she can do so evenly. “But if so, I’m the one living with the consequences.” 

The way his eyes widen slightly isn’t as satisfying as she’d hoped it would be. 

_Keep it together, Erso,_ she tells herself in the mirror after he’s gone. He’s got Draven’s ear. If she wants them to let her pilot Partisan again, she can’t give him any reason to suspect she’s not ready for this. 

She raises a hand to grip her mother’s necklace, still around her neck. With the other, she traces absently over the scars radiating from her left shoulder. 

_Reckless, eh? I’ll show you what I can do._


	4. Shatterdome, Part 2

Jyn’s not sure who she expects to be behind the knock on her door a few hours later, but it’s certainly not who it turns out to be.

Bodhi stares at her for a moment when the door swings open, like he didn’t expect her to answer it. Or maybe it’s that she’s not wearing a shirt, having just rolled out of bed in a sports bra and sweats. His eyes flicker down, and get stuck on the scars peeking out from under the strap on her shoulder.

“It’s okay,” Jyn says after a moment. “You can ask.”

Bodhi flushes slightly. “Uh. Those are from…”

“Anchorage,” Jyn says. When he doesn’t seem to know what to say to that, she takes pity on him. “Did you need something?”

“Oh,” he says, “No. Well, I—it’s lunch time, and I thought maybe you’d like some company?”

Jyn blinks, then smiles a little. “That’s… really nice of you.”

Bodhi rubs the back of his neck. “I try?” He pauses, and his cheeks get a little pinker. “But, uh, you might want to put some more clothes on?”

“Fair enough,” Jyn says agreeably. She turns to grab her fatigues off the bed, shimmies quickly into them, and sticks her feet into her boots without bothering to lace them up. When she turns around, she finds that Bodhi’s turned away a little, as if to give her privacy. It’s _considerate_ , in a way Jyn’s not used to and isn’t quite sure how to react to.

After a moment, she decides not to comment. Words have never been her strong suit anyway. “Good to go.”

On the way to the cafeteria, he tells her all about the upgrades _Partisan Rebel_ ’s gone through, the new weapons systems and streamlined pilot interface. Jyn listens with interest; five years is a long time to be out of a Jaeger, and she can’t rely on old, faded memories to make the transition back into the fight easy. Besides, it makes it easier to brush off the occasional stares and murmurs she gets as they walk down the halls.

Coming down the stairs with their lunch trays, they’re intercepted by a smiling Bail Organa. “Come sit with us,” he invites.

Jyn glances at the table he gestures to. It’s mostly empty, but for the young woman she saw near _Tantive Endeavor_ earlier. “I don’t know,” she starts.

“I insist,” Bail says gently. “If we’re going to fight together, we should talk a little first, don’t you think?”

That makes an irritating amount of sense, so Jyn shrugs in acquiescence. She and Bodhi follow him to the table. Jyn ends up sandwiched between Bail and Bodhi, though both are careful to give her enough elbow room.

Bail’s daughter looks up on their approach. She nods to Bodhi, then gives Jyn a once-over that’s not quite rude, but businesslike. “So you’re Jyn Erso?”

“I am,” Jyn says.

“This is my daughter and co-pilot, Leia,” Bail says.

Jyn nods, but any further pleasantry she might dig up from her minimal ability to socialize gets derailed at the smell of the food on her tray. It’s nothing fancy – simple, hearty, lots of energy packed into it – but coming from a place where hot food was a luxury, it makes her stomach growl eagerly.

“I hope you don’t mind my asking,” Leia says, with something in her tone that suggests she doesn’t really care if Jyn minds, “but I’ve been wondering. You last piloted five years ago.”

“Mm,” Jyn acknowledges around a mouthful of food.

“Where have you been all that time?” Leia asks.

 _That_ sounds like a challenge, enough so that Jyn’s temper flares hot inside her. She chews slowly, giving herself time to cool off. “I was in construction,” she says. “On the Wall.”

“That’s useful,” Leia says, surprisingly diplomatic.

Jyn shrugs. “Better than becoming a vegetable.”

Leia pauses, her face softening a little. “Fair enough.”

“Ah, the prodigal pilot returns!” a cheerful voice announces. With surprising grace, Chirrut Îmwe slides onto the bench opposite Jyn, flashing a smile that seems genuine enough. Baze Malbus sits down next to him a moment later, giving her a brief nod.

Jyn glances at Bodhi, who nods encouragingly. “That’s me,” she says.

“I’ve heard a great deal about you, Jyn Erso,” Chirrut says, a conspiratorial slant to his grin, “I wonder how much of it is true.”

It’s a little too soon to tell, but something about the blind pilot’s forward attitude sets Jyn at ease. She shrugs a shoulder casually. “That depends on what you’ve heard. Care to spill the beans?”

“I prefer collecting rumors, not spreading them,” he says easily.

“Most of the time,” Baze adds in a basso rumble.

“Didn’t stop you from spreading that one about me and the Secretary of State,” a new voice grumbles loudly. A brown-haired man sets his tray down on the far side of Bodhi’s. _Han Solo_ , Jyn decides, going off the stylized falcon emblem on his vest. Which makes the towering, hirsute man settling down just beyond him Chewbacca, his copilot.

Solo grins at her and leans over Bodhi to offer a hand. “Hi. Han Solo.”

“Jyn Erso,” she says, gripping his hand briefly. “What’s this about the Secretary of State?”

“It was a good story,” Chirrut says. “Though not nearly as good as what she did when she heard about it.”

Solo’s grin sours. “Could’ve done without your help, you know.”

Chirrut laughs and waves a hand airily. “It was all in good fun.”

“Maybe it’ll teach you to be a little more discreet next time,” Leia puts in. Jyn glances at her; by the sharp-eyed glare she’s giving Solo, there’s some history there.

“Leia,” Bail chides gently.

“Bah,” Solo says. “None of it was true, anyway. Not that you’ll believe me.” Chewbacca adds something pointed in Russian. “Exactly,” Solo says.

“Why should I?” Leia counters. “You haven’t proven yourself very trustworthy in the past.”

“That’s enough,” Bail interjects, a little less gently. “So, Jyn,” he continues, deliberately turning to her. “I hear you’re holding copilot trials tomorrow?”

“Seems that way.”

He nods. “We have a lot of good candidates. I’m sure you’ll be able to find someone suitable.”

Jyn looks down at her plate, her appetite abruptly waning. _Suitable_ isn’t good enough. Not to fill the aching, yawning void in her head.

She loses track of the conversation for a few moments, only to be drawn out by a scandalized voice from behind her: “Artoo! I didn’t even know that word _had_ a sign.”

Artoo Deetu drops into the bench on Leia’s free side, signing furiously. Threepio totters up unsteadily, his cane hooked over one elbow as he tries to juggle two full trays. One starts to slide off his arm, and Jyn stands up to snag it.

“Thank you,” Threepio says, puffing a little of his wispy blonde hair out of his face. He slides the tray he still holds across to Artoo, and Jyn sets the one she rescued on the table next to Bail’s as Threepio carefully sits.

Artoo ignores the food entirely, his hands busy signing at a furious rate.

Jyn almost turns to Threepio, before realizing that while she can’t understand ASL, Artoo can understand English just fine. “What’s wrong?” she asks the scientist.

He signs. “I’m sorry,” Threepio says, “I usually stick to literal translations, but he’s saying some very rude things. He’s upset because General Draven decided to rely on Doctor Tuesso’s research rather than his.”

“Your research is dangerous,” Bail says. “We just don’t have the resources anymore to risk it.”

“Wait,” Jyn says, interest truly piqued now. “Research on what, exactly?” When Bail doesn’t answer, she presses, “Come on. We’re the ones carrying out this plan, we deserve to know the details, no matter what the General thinks.”

He looks at her. Then his eyes skate past her. Jyn doesn’t look away, but judging by where he’s looking she’d guess the other pilots want to know, too. He sighs. “Alright. Doctors Tuesso and Deetu have been working to find the optimal time for our assault on the Breach.”

“And?” Jyn prompts.

Bail hesitates. “It’s going to be soon. Doctor Tuesso’s calculations predict it opening far enough to admit _Tantive_ within a few days.”

Jyn studies him. “That’s not the whole truth, is it?” she asks quietly.

He smiles wryly. “No. But the rest truly is classified. I’m not able to share it when I know General Draven wouldn’t agree.”

Artoo nearly knocks over his drink, he’s signing so fast. “Kay Tuesso is working in theory,” Threepio translates, his hesitant voice an odd contrast to the obvious fury in Artoo’s face. “I’m offering _facts_.”

Bail shakes his head. “I’m sorry. The decision’s been made.”

The scientist glares for a long moment, then stands, taking his tray and stalking off further into the cafeteria. “Oh, dear,” Threepio murmurs.

“Is he always like that?” Jyn asks.

“Artoo has always been… excitable,” Threepio says, still staring after his friend. “But this is unusually agitated, even for him.”

“Some sacrifices have to be made,” Bail says, sounding weary. “Hopefully, when he calms down, he can understand that.”

“I hope so,” Threepio says dubiously.

 


	5. Drift Compatible

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “The candidate trials,” Cassian says. “I want to fight.”

Cassian Andor has always considered himself a patient man. He learned early to choose the things he wanted carefully, because the world was determined to take them away from him. And the things he wants, he waits for. 

He waited for his parents to return after the kaiju attack that brought Mexico City to its knees. They didn’t. Eventually, Draven came instead. 

He waited to enter the Jaeger Academy until he was of age (unlike a certain headstrong pilot he could name). Five long years after Catalon’s attack, he did. 

He waited to become a ranger, to pilot a Jaeger for himself and finally fight back against the kaiju first hand. He’s still waiting. 

Watching Jyn Erso head off with Bodhi from Operations, Cassian’s increasingly sure that his time is running out. He can’t afford to wait anymore. 

He goes looking for Draven. He checks the General’s office first, then his quarters. Cassian would rather have this conversation in private, but it seems it’s not to be. He widens his search. 

Finally, he finds Draven in the operations center, overseeing the last touches on  _ Partisan Rebel _ for Jyn’s test Drift with her new copilot the next day. As he waits for acknowledgement, he finds himself fidgeting. Either Erso’s impatience is contagious, or… he’s nervous. 

Draven turns to him. “Can we talk in private, sir?” Cassian asks. He’s all too aware of the number of people in the room. 

The General’s eyebrows draw together. He nods.

Back in his office, Draven moves to sit behind his desk. He doesn’t show it in front of most people, but Cassian knows the lasting effects of Draven’s time as a ranger. He knows that Draven’s body isn’t nearly as hale and hearty as the General would have people believe. In this case, it’s convenient; it gives Cassian a chance to square his shoulders, clasping his hands behind his back. 

“What’s this about?” Draven asks once he’s settled. 

“The candidate trials,” Cassian says. “I want to fight.” 

Draven studies him for a long moment. Then, slowly, he shakes his head. “We have a dozen candidates who are qualified to throw a punch. I need you here using your mind, not your fists.”

Cassian bites down hard on a rare flare of temper before it can show as more than a flicker on his face. “You promised me,” he points out, as evenly as he can. “This is the last chance.”

The regret in Draven’s eyes just drives the knife in deeper. “I know,” he says. “For what it’s worth, I am sorry. But my decision is final.”

Cassian’s fingers start to tingle from how tightly he’s gripping his own wrist. He wants to argue; his heart demands with every beat that he  _ fight _ . He’s dreamed of it for so long, of the power of a Jaeger underneath him, the power to finally strike back at the kaiju. To pay them back personally for all they’ve taken from him, and from the world. He rocks on his feet, gets as far as to open his mouth to demand what he’s been waiting his whole life for. 

A life of discipline. Professionalism. Doing what needs to be done. Is he really going to throw that away? Throw a tantrum to get his own selfish desire? No matter how badly he  _ wants _ , that’s not who he is. 

He swallows hard. Takes one deep breath, then another.

“I’ll have the candidates ready at 0600,” he says. 

Draven studies him for a long moment. Then nods. “Dismissed, Captain.”

\--

He arrives in the training room the next morning at 0500, nose buried in his clipboard as he goes over the names of the half dozen candidates he’s selected. None of them less than stellar, their records damn close to spotless and their test scores topping the charts. Any one of them would be a fine pilot. He studiously ignores the fact that his own record is better than all of them. 

The training room is dim, lit only by the emergency lights recessed into the edges of the ceiling. He hits the switch to turn the main lights on.

Jyn Erso sits in the middle of the mat, paused mid-stretch as she reaches down one extended leg. She raises an eyebrow at him, blinking a little in the sudden light. “Morning.”

For a second, he’s at a loss. He’d expected to have at least half an hour before any of the candidates started to show up, and if he’s totally honest with himself, he’d kind of thought he’d have to pry Jyn Erso out of bed when the time came. The surprise short-circuits his filter for a moment. “Why are you sitting here in the dark?”

Her eyebrow inches higher, a hint of a smile playing around the edges of her mouth. Heat tinges Cassian’s cheeks. After a moment, Jyn shrugs a shoulder. “It wasn’t that dark.” 

“Ah,” he says, and pauses, at a loss for what else to say. 

Apparently, that’s enough. Still with that faint smirk on her face, Jyn goes back to her stretches. Cassian circles the mat, deliberately not looking at the way the light outlines the muscles in her arms, the way it catches on the scars poking out from under the strap of her tank top. He doesn’t need to ask what they are. Plenty of the reports he’s read on the Anchorage incident contained medical breakdowns of what Jyn’s damaged, burned-out suit had done to her body. Though, as he remembers the details now… She might be a sloppy, dangerous fighter, but he’d be lying if he claimed not to be impressed by her courage in being willing to put on a suit again at all. 

He puts it out of his mind and turns his attention back to his list. Jyn, for her part, does him the courtesy of ignoring him as he sets up the room. 

By the time Draven arrives at 0600, it seems like half the base has turned out to watch. It’s not surprising; while the incident in Anchorage has faded from the general public consciousness by now, those involved in the Jaeger Program remember. In addition to the six candidates lined up loosely along one wall, all three of the other Jaeger teams have shown up to watch. Kay Tuesso nods to Cassian from the other side of the room as he settles into a corner. Everyone’s pretending not to, but at any given time at least half the eyes in the room are on Jyn Erso, now spinning her practice staff in the middle of the mat with no apparent care for who might be watching. 

She doesn’t appear to notice Draven making his way around the mat to where Cassian stands. That is, until Draven’s foot hits the top step. She spins the stave to a stop and cocks it over one shoulder lazily. “Let’s get this show on the road, shall we?”

Draven’s mouth twitches. He nods once. 

Cassian knows the names of the candidates as well as his own, but he still checks his list before calling out the first one. “Ruescott Melshi.” From Jyn’s home country of the UK. 46 drops, 44 kills. 

A tall white man with a cocky smile steps forward from the wall, giving his own staff a couple of experimental twirls. Jyn watches him until his smile wavers, and only then turns and brings her own staff to a ready position. 

Cassian wrestles down a sharp pang of jealousy. “First to three points,” he says. “Begin when ready.”

Half an hour and five matches later, Cassian’s not having trouble with jealousy anymore. Instead, he’s annoyed. 

Everything he’s read about Jyn Erso, every simulation and recording he’s ever watched of her fighting style shows that, while she lacks the discipline of many Jaeger pilots, she’s quick, brutal, and has an uncanny instinct for zeroing in on her opponent’s weakness and exploiting it with ruthless efficiency. He hadn’t really admitted it to himself, but he’d been looking forward to seeing her in action. 

Which makes it all the more frustrating that she isn’t even  _ trying _ . Melshi gives her at least three openings that she doesn’t bother to take. She lets Pao score a point that she could have easily avoided, then takes him down with a grin that says she’s enjoying herself. While he doesn’t manage to land a hit on her, her bout with Tonc takes a full  _ five minutes _ . 

It’s not his place to judge, he reminds himself every time an opponent crosses off the mat. He’s not here to critique. He tamps down on his annoyance, keeps his face neutral whenever the combatants look his way. 

Her final opponent, Joma, has barely cleared the mat when she abruptly turns to face him. “What is your problem?”

Cassian blinks. “What problem?”

“You keep making this face,” Jyn says. She wrinkles her nose, purses her lips, and draws her eyebrows together for a moment. 

Cassian’s face goes hot. He glances at Draven, but the General just looks back impassively. 

“Which wouldn’t bother me,” Jyn continues, when it’s obvious he’s not going to speak, “Except that I can’t figure out what I might’ve done to piss you off. Care to enlighten me?”

A couple of nervous titters run through the crowd. Cassian ignores them, drawing himself up a little. If she thinks he’s going to just roll over… “I have a question for you, actually,” he says slowly. 

“Hit me,” Jyn says. 

“Why aren’t you taking this seriously?” he asks. Jyn’s eyebrows furrow again, in genuine confusion this time, and Cassian elaborates. “You’re not even trying.”

“You think so.”

“You could’ve taken all of them at least two moves sooner,” he says. “You’re playing, like this is a game. Did you forget the stakes out there in Alaska?”

Her eyes flash, the fires of her nearly-legendary temper flaring behind her irises. “Don’t you  _ dare _ lecture me about stakes, Captain,” she growls. 

He opens his mouth to shoot back, but a sharp look from Draven quells him. He swallows the words back down, tries (unsuccessfully) to rein in his anger. 

Jyn doesn’t miss it, that look. Her eyes flicker to Draven, then back. Then, slowly, unbelievably, she smirks. It’s not a particularly nice expression. “Playing, huh?” she says. “Why don’t you come play, then?”

“Captain Andor is not one of the pilot candidates,” Draven says. 

“Yeah. Why  _ is _ that?” she presses. Then, with an edge, “Afraid he might lose?”

The clipboard creaks in Cassian’s hands. He doesn’t look, but he’s sure his knuckles have gone ghost white from the strain. “Sir,” he says. 

Draven turns, just slightly, to look at him. Cassian meets his eyes squarely. 

After a long, silent moment, Draven nods. 

When Cassian looks back at Jyn, she’s grinning. To his mild surprise, he can feel his own mouth turn up to mirror hers. Slowly, deliberately, he sets his clipboard down and removes his boots. It takes him a couple of tries to undo the second set of laces, his fingers trembling. Not from fear, or anxiety, or anger, but from anticipation. 

Melshi tosses him a staff. Cassian gives it a couple of spins, runs his hand across the smooth, familiar grain of the wood. He takes his time to settle into a ready stance, and only then looks up.

Jyn Erso’s eyes meet his. Her lips are still curled into a smirk, but her gaze is steady, almost solemn as she takes him in. Something  _ snaps _ into place between them, thrumming like a line drawn suddenly taut. A rush of adrenaline surges through him.

“Begin,” Draven says. 

A split second later, Jyn’s staff stops inches from his forehead. “One-zero,” she says, and backs off, spinning her weapon idly. She grins at the look on his face. “You wanted me to stop playing, right?”

So that’s the way it’s going to be. “You’re right, I did,” he says. He feints left, reverses the blow at the last second. His staff  _ thwacks _ into Jyn’s exposed side. “One-one.”

He’s barely taken a step away when she comes at him again. Whatever reserve she’d had before is gone; the blows come fast and hard, forcing Cassian to stay on the defensive to keep them from connecting. He’s so focused on the staff that he doesn’t notice her foot sweep out to catch his until he’s already falling. He lands hard on his back, the tip of her weapon hovering above his chest. 

“Two-one,” she says, and lifts the staff away. 

He rolls to his feet and immediately brings the staff around, catching her ankles and sending her staggering. She doesn’t fall, but by the time she recovers he’s scored his second point. 

“Nice trick,” she says, puffing loose strands of hair out of her face. Cassian grins. 

They circle. Jyn’s eyes almost seem to glow in the light from overhead. Heat builds in Cassian’s chest, a fierce, burning need to prove himself. It’s not enough that he’s clearly the closest match she’s had all morning. No, he wants to  _ win _ .

She comes after him again, but this time he meets her halfway, cutting her momentum before she has a chance to overwhelm him. The clacking of their staves reaches a fever pitch; Jyn has the advantage on speed, but Cassian’s form is picture perfect, leaving no hole in his defenses for her to exploit. 

Until, instinctively, he lets his staff slip a little too low on one side. Jyn’s eyes light up, and she swings, fully committed--

Cassian drops below the blow and bulls forward into her legs, flipping her over his back (and hearing her startled gasp as he does). She hits the ground chest-first, and he taps the point of his staff on the mat next to her head. “Three. That’s match.”

He’s not sure what he expects - an explosion of temper, maybe, her psych profiles had always made her out to be a sore loser - but it’s not what happens. 

Jyn Erso  _ laughs _ . It’s a short, sharp sound, and Cassian’s not sure what to make of it until she gets to her feet and turns so he can see her face. That strange light is still in her eyes, a fierce grin on her face. “Good fight,” she says. 

“I’ve seen what I need to see,” Draven says. The heat in Cassian’s chest dims a little at the reminder that there are others in the room. 

“So have I,” Jyn says. She turns to him, gestures to Cassian. “He’s my copilot.”

Cassian’s breath catches in his throat. 

For a long moment, the room is dead silent. Then, Draven sighs. “I’m afraid that’s not possible,” he says. An ice-cold wave of disappointment rushes through Cassian, leaving him frozen. 

“Why not?” Jyn demands. 

“I’ve made my decision.”

“And why do you get to decide?” she presses. “Are you piloting  _ Partisan _ , or am I?”

Draven looks at her coolly for a long moment. “Report to the Shatterdome in two hours to find out who your copilot will be.” He holds her gaze for another second, then turns on his heel and exits. 

His departure breaks whatever spell was on the crowd. Suddenly, everyone is moving, or speaking, several dozen voices rehashing the fight. 

Combined with the crushing disappointment, it’s too much. He doesn’t quite run out of the room (even now, he’s too professional for that), but he comes close. 

The further he gets from the mat, the clearer his memory of the fight becomes. As the remaining adrenaline fades, a thread of shame creeps in in its place. 

He’d lost control. He’d become so focused on winning that he’d let his careful discipline go. Where he should’ve won by skill, he’d won by luck. Luck isn’t enough to beat the kaiju. How could he blame Draven for seeing that?

Jyn catches up to him just before he reaches the haven of his quarters. “Cassian, wait.”

The sound of her voice is enough to stop him in his tracks, a sharp pang of longing shooting through his chest. He turns. Her eyes are still bright, now more with anger and frustration than whatever it was on the mat. 

She keeps coming until she’s nearly touching him. An hour ago it would have felt too familiar; now, it just sends pins and needles racing across his skin. “You felt that, right? You must have. We’re Drift compatible.”

Of course he felt it—feels it. How could he not? “It doesn’t matter,” he says. 

“It does,” she insists. “Look, I don’t know what stick Draven has up his ass, but I’m the one who’s gonna be in that Conn-Pod. We don’t have to listen to him.”

Anger sparks inside him. “We can’t all pick and choose what rules we want to follow,” he snaps. “The General is the only thing that’s kept the Jaeger Program alive. It’s his decision.”

“That’s a cop-out and you know it,” Jyn shoots back. A hint of a sneer touches her mouth, but he can see a strange sort of hurt behind the anger in her eyes. “If you’re afraid, why don’t you just admit it?”

“It’s not fear,” he says, icy cold. “It’s respect. But you wouldn’t understand that.” 

She flinches back a little, just for a second. He takes advantage of the opening. “I have a lot to do. If you’ll excuse me, Miss Erso.” 

He turns for the door to his room. She doesn’t try to stop him, doesn’t speak as he keys in the code to unlock it, but he feels her eyes on him until, with finality, it slams shut behind him. 


	6. RABIT

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They Drift.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaand we're back! I'm going to try and stay on schedule from here on out, but I may have to drop to biweekly to make it work. We'll see!

“Doctor Tuesso! Doctor Tuesso, please slow down!”

Kay Tuesso allows himself a single sigh. While he has the utmost respect for Threepio’s professional skills (not to mention his patience, considering how well he puts up with Deetu’s shenanigans), his demeanor leaves something to be desired. Still, he stops and turns to watch as Threepio hurries up.

It takes the shorter man a moment to catch his breath. Kay notes his normally coiffed blond hair looks a bit bedraggled, his usually neat (if conservative) suit coat a bit rumpled. He tries not to think about the time he’s currently wasting that could be spent on calculations. Cassian’s always told him he needs to work on his interpersonal skills.

“Have you seen Artoo this morning?” Threepio finally asks, his voice still breathy from exertion.

“No,” Kay says. “But then, I usually don’t. Not until he starts dumping his entrails on my side of the room.” He pauses. “You haven’t?”

Threepio makes a helpless little gesture. “He’s been in a bit of a mood since yesterday.”

“He’s always in a bit of a mood.”

The interpreter visibly decides not to respond to that. “But he wasn’t in the cafeteria this morning.”

“And?”

“Artoo never misses a meal,” Threepio says.

Kay’s first instinct is to snort, but Threepio looks so gravely serious that he stifles the impulse. “Have you checked the lab?” he asks instead.

“I was about to,” Threepio says, “But then I saw you, and, well, I thought—“

“I’m going there now,” Kay says. He would’ve been there long since, if not for the candidate trials this morning. “If he’s not there, I will… do something anatomically improbable.”

Threepio looks puzzled. “How will that help?”

Kay stifles another sigh. “Never mind.” He starts to walk again, shortening his strides enough that Threepio can keep up without difficulty. He expects to have to make awkward small talk (and _oh,_ how he despises small talk), but for once Threepio is quiet but for the steady click of his cane against the floor.

They round the corner to the lab. Threepio lets out a gasp. “Artoo!”

It takes a moment for Kay to recognize the form crumpled against one of the carts as Deetu, but the shock of blue hair poking out from under some strange piece of headgear is a dead giveaway. He covers the distance to Deetu’s side in two long strides. Dropping to a knee, he pulls the contraption off and tosses it aside. “Artoo Deetu, what mess have you made this time?”

Artoo stirs faintly, hands twitching, but his eyes stay closed.

Threepio lands beside Kay in a somewhat ungainly heap. “Artoo! Artoo, can you hear me?”

Kay pries up one of Deetu’s eyelids to find the sclera underneath flooded red, the pupil blown out so wide he can barely make out the iris around it. He releases the scientist’s face, letting Threepio’s fussing fade into the background as he takes another look at the contraption on the ground.

He’s more of a mathematician than a scientist, but he’s spent more than enough time around Jaeger pilots to recognize what it must be. He traces the cable coming off the back of it, back to a cart festooned with screens and strange protrusions, and from there… to the kaiju brain hanging in its fluorescent tank.

Kay finds he’s shaking his head, and he’s not sure if it’s from disbelief or grudging admiration. “Oh, you absolute wanker.”

\--

The walk from Jyn’s quarters to the prep room isn’t that long. It never is, in any Shatterdome she’s ever been in. Pilots have to be able to get to their Jaegers quickly. It takes long enough to suit up; the five minutes spent walking halfway across the base could be the difference between no casualties and thousands of deaths.

Five minutes, to a kaiju, is more than enough time.

And yet, she arrives at the Drivesuit room feeling like she’s run a marathon. Her heart pounds. Her neck aches, muscles tight. Her fingers tingle. Cold sweat soaks her fatigues.

She stops just outside, before any of the technicians in the room spot her, and struggles to catch her breath.

“Jyn?” a familiar voice asks. “Are you alright?”

If it was anyone but Bodhi Rook… but it is him. And she has to trust _someone_.

She raises her head to meet his concerned brown eyes, rakes sweat-damp hair out of her face, and tries a shaky grin. “Jury’s still out.”

He doesn’t laugh. Jyn’s not sure she wanted him to. Instead, he nods. “I get it.”

“Do you?” Jyn demands. She winces. “That came out harsh.”

Now he smiles, just a little. “It’s okay.” He takes in a breath. “But yeah, I do. I grew up in San Francisco. Well, since I was six.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. My sister died on K-DAY.”

“So did Saw’s,” Jyn blurts, then thinks better of it. Heat rises in her cheeks. “I probably shouldn’t… sorry.”

He waves it off. “I know it’s not the same. We weren’t sharing a mind when she died, but… Sometimes it felt like we did, when we were littler.” He rubs the back of his neck. “You’re not alone, is all I’m trying to say.”

“Yeah,” she says, and is surprised to find the breath coming easier in her chest. “Thanks.” Then she frowns. “Wait. Why are you up here? Shouldn’t you be in LOCCENT?”

He flushes a little. “Well, yeah. But, well, I thought maybe… Like I said, I get it. I thought maybe you might want a friendly face.”

A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth. “Thanks, Bodhi.”

“No problem.”

He doesn’t join her in the Drivesuit room; the technicians are used to working around each other, but there are a lot of them, and an extra body in the mix would throw them off. The calm he helped her find sticks around, though, at least until her simmering anger at Draven takes its place. Her fingers clench in the Drivesuit’s glove. A General he may be, but he’s been out of a Conn-Pod for a lot longer than Jyn. And for all that he’s gone on about this last, precious mission, he sure seems willing to shoot one of his four remaining pilot teams in the foot.

The armor’s spine snaps into place. Jyn takes one deep breath, then another, willing herself to cool her temper. It’s not her copilot’s fault that Draven’s got a stick up his ass. And she can’t afford to take that resentment into the Drift.

A technician hands her her helmet. She thanks him absently and walks, almost on autopilot, into the Conn-Pod.

It doesn’t look quite the same. Some of the displays are a different shape, the floor and walls gleaming with the kind of sheen that only unused equipment ever has. And of course, Jyn notes with grim humor, the fuck-off enormous ragged hole on the right side of the pod isn’t there this time around.

Habit carries her to the left side of the pod, but she thinks better of it. Her left shoulder technically recovered fully from the damage done by Knifehead’s attack, but… better not to chance it.

When her copilot arrives, she doesn’t look up from the display on the arm of her suit, using it to help quash a fresh wave of irritation. “I’ll take the right side, if you don’t mind,” she says, letting her tone add _and even if you do._ “Left shoulder’s been a bit off since Anchorage.”

The other pilot’s footsteps stop. “Sure,” he says. Jyn’s head snaps up.

Cassian Andor stands across the Conn-Pod from her, a hint of a smile playing around his lips and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes. He’s decked out in his own Drivesuit, and Jyn gets distracted for a moment by the way the light gleams off of it.

She doesn’t even try to hide the sudden smile that spreads unbidden across her face. “You’ll have to tell me your secret,” she says.

His brows draw together slightly. “My secret?” he echoes.

“To getting the stick out of Draven’s ass.”

His eyes go wide, and he lets out a startled laugh that he tries very hard to disguise as a snort. A seed of warmth takes root in Jyn’s chest – sure, what she’d felt on that mat was unmistakable, but she’s seen pilot teams before who are a dream on the field and a nightmare in the Dome. After their confrontation, she’d wondered if that would have been their fate.

Nice to know she hadn’t chosen wrong.

She’s been staring too long, she realizes. He hasn’t spoken, just raised his eyebrow.

“You look good,” she says finally, with a sincerity that surprises her even as it comes out.

He looks for a moment like he’s wondering if she’s teasing him, but then he ducks his head a little. “So do you.”

Bodhi’s cheerful voice breaks into the moment, blaring from the Conn-Pod speakers. “Ready?”

“You have no idea,” Jyn says, and wonders if he can hear the grin in her voice.

In the instant before they Drift, cold fear drips down Jyn’s spine. She’s spent five years trying to patch the hole Saw left in her mind. What if this blows it wide open? What if her mind—what if _she—_ shatters under the pressure? What if she can’t take it, and it drops her down into the dark she spent so long fighting her way out of?

What if she takes Cassian with her?

“Initializing Drift,” Bodhi says.

 _Wait,_ Jyn thinks.

They Drift.

She’s never been able to describe the Drift. She’s never met any pilot who can. The Drift is feeling. The Drift is images, fast and furious and clear as glass. The Drift is _knowing,_ like the sea knows the sand, like the Earth knows the sun, like a bird knows the wind.

First Drifts are all of that and more. The first time is like coming home to a place you’ve never seen before.

 _Cassian_.

There’s no hiding anything in the Drift. His desire to fight beats like a drum, fierce, deafening, matching the pulse in her veins. He meets her grief with his own, flashes of two strangers with familiar, beloved faces. Deep down, under her fury and his reserve, they’re the same.

They are what the kaiju made them.

She opens her eyes, and knows that Cassian does, too.

“Nicely done,” Bodhi says into their helmets, “You’re both in alignment.”

“Don’t need to tell us that,” Jyn says cheerfully.

They raise one fist and pound it into the opposite palm. The Conn-Pod shakes as _Partisan Rebel_ does the same.

“Well done, _Partisan_ ,” Draven says. Pride warms Jyn’s chest. It’s not her own, but it might as well be. She knows she’ll never see Draven the same way again. She doesn’t care.

They put _Partisan_ through a few movement tests so basic that once Jyn would have snored through them. Now, she stays alert, attuned to the way Cassian’s mind moves against hers, and thanking whatever gods there are that she still remembers Saw clearly enough to feel the difference between them. Cassian doesn’t fill the hole, but with him there, it doesn’t feel like he has to.

She looks over at him. He grins back. The light shines through his faceplate, catching in his dark irises—

_“Jyn, listen to me!” Saw shouts. Water pours down his suit. Jyn’s ears ring with a hundred different alerts, but Saw’s words lance straight into her brain: “Keep fighting! Keep—“_

Jyn staggers.

“ _Partisan,_ what’s happening?” Bodhi asks, a little frantic. “You’re both way out of alignment.”

“Flashback,” Jyn grits out, putting a hand to her head. “I got it, it’s under control.”

“You’re stabilizing,” Bodhi says, “But Cassian…”

Jyn looks over at him. His entire body’s gone stiff. Anger and terror and grief wash against her in waves, battering against her tenuous hold on the present.

“He’s chasing the RABIT,” Bodhi finishes.

“Cassian,” Jyn says. She can feel him, still, not quite buried under the tempest, but he’s slipping away. “Cassian, stay with me!” She _reaches_.

_Ash rains slowly, speckling her visor. Broken glass and concrete crunch under her booted feet._

_Ahead, Cassian, his face young, the ill-advised beginnings of what will become his beard scraggly around his lips. Beyond him, towering high above, Catalon glows iridescent blue against the smoke filling the sky._

_Cassian chases after the monster, rage and terror burning hot and cold inside him. He pulls civilians from the rubble, points them away from the kaiju and urges them to run._

_Screams echo over the far-off sounds of sirens and the nearby sounds of crunching rock and screeching metal as Catalon turns its attention to the ground at its feet._ A shelter _, Jyn realizes._

_Cassian doesn’t miss a beat. He scoops a rock off the ground, waits until the monster ducks low to dig, then pitches it with uncanny accuracy into one of six eyes. Catalon screeches. He throws another, and Catalon turns._

_“Can’t catch me, pendejo!” he shouts. He runs._

“Jyn. Jyn!”

Jyn drags herself bodily back to the present. “What?”

“The cannon!”

Bodhi sounds fully panicked now, but Jyn can’t really blame him; Cassian’s hand is outstretched. The humming whine of the plasma cannon fills the pod. Rage burns inside her, but she’s used to that.

Jyn stabs at the buttons between them. Her display flashes red. “My failsafes aren’t working.”

“Neither are ours,” Bodhi says, his voice slipping from panicked to grim.

_A claw stabs into the ground beside him. He staggers, falls, scrambles back to his feet._

Jyn claws her way back out. “There has to be something. Where’s Draven?”

Clicking and shouting underscore Bodhi’s answer. “There was some kind of crisis with Doctor Deetu.” He sucks in a breath. “Wait, I know—“

_Cassian plunges into an alley, diving for cover behind a dumpster. He fumbles on the ground, finds a piece of sharp rebar, and grips it tight. If he’s going down, he’s taking this cabrón—_

Jyn never thought she’d see the day when the sound of _Partisan_ powering down was a relief. The Drift fades away, and Jyn fights down the stab of longing that goes through her. She pauses just long enough to confirm the plasma cannon is on its way back to being just an arm, then hits the release on the spinal clamp.

Cassian wrenches his way free of his own, his breath coming sharp and fast. As soon as he’s free, he pushes the helmet off, letting it fall to the ground. His cheeks are wet. So are Jyn’s.

For a long moment, they stare at each other. The Drift echoes between them.

Jyn takes a step forward and throws her arms around him, uncaring of the way their suits scrape together. Cassian freezes for the barest instant, then his arms are around her, too.

They don’t break apart until the techs crack open the Conn-Pod, a full five minutes later.

In a strange, ironic echo, Bodhi’s waiting for them when they exit the Drivesuit room. For a moment, there’s nothing between them but grim silence.

“Good thinking, pulling the plug,” Jyn says. Cassian nods.

“Thanks,” Bodhi says, raking a hand through his hair. “I’ve, uh, got some bad news.” He looks from Jyn to Cassian and back. “Draven wants to see you. Both of you.”


	7. Bone Slums

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “So, what?” Jyn asks. “You’re grounding us?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm officially dropping the schedule to biweekly until I can build up a buffer again. Hope you enjoy!

When they reach Draven’s office, he’s not waiting for them. On the contrary, in fact: through the closed door, Jyn can hear muffled voices in heated discussion. Though she can’t make out the words through the thick metal, it’s not like she really needs to. There’s only one thing Leia and Bail Organa would be meeting with the General about right now.

They settle in to wait. Jyn alternates between tapping her foot and staring holes in the door. She’s not sure if this is deliberate power play or just bad timing, but either way, it’s a mistake. It gives the shame and leftover fear from the Drift gone wrong time to fade slowly away, and for anger to rise to take its place.

She knows where this is going. She’s been grounded once before, and she’s not interested in letting it happen again.

Finally, the door opens and Leia Organa steps out. Through the door, Jyn’s eyes meet Bail’s, and he gives a little nod of acknowledgement. “Give us a moment,” he says—to her or to Leia, she’s not sure—and the door swings closed again.

Leia studies them both, her lips pursed in a judgmental little moue.

“You have something to say? Feel free to say it to my face,” Jyn invites, feeling the corner of her lip curl into a sneer.

“Jyn,” Cassian says quietly.

Leia’s eyes flicker to him, then back. “Alright,” she says, slowly. “I don’t think you’re fit for this mission. Either of you. A stunt like that on the field could get us all killed, and it happened in _testing_. In the environment with the lowest stress possible.”

“It won’t happen again,” Jyn bites out.

“Are you sure?” Leia presses. “Because you’d be gambling all of our lives, and the lives of everyone else who’s survived the kaiju this far. All of them. So you’d better be sure.”

Jyn almost wishes she sounded angry. She knows what to do with anger, knows how to meet someone who wants to fight with a punch to the jaw. But Leia’s just serious, and solemn, and there’s a hint of sympathy in her eyes that makes Jyn’s spine itch. Even worse, she can practically _feel_ the way the words land on Cassian, the infinitesimal droop in his shoulders.

Luckily, Bail picks that moment to exit Draven’s office, saving Jyn from needing to find a way to respond. “Erso, Andor,” Draven calls.

Bail doesn’t say anything, but he does clasp Jyn’s shoulder briefly on the way by. Jyn’s stomach churns.

Inside, there are two chairs waiting, facing Draven where he sits behind his desk. Cassian takes one of them. Jyn stays standing. “I’m the one who went out of phase,” she says, the instant the door to the hallway is shut.

Draven looks at her for a long moment. “I’m aware of that,” he says eventually.

Jyn folds her arms across her chest. “It won’t happen again.”

The General looks at Cassian. “Anything to add?”

Cassian takes a breath, then looks up to meet Draven’s eyes squarely. “Permission to recuse myself from the Breach mission, sir.”

Jyn’s heart shudders to a stop. Cassian doesn’t look at her. An icy thread of betrayal curls up her spine, but she fights it down. “What? No.” She turns to Draven again. “I lost control of my memories. It was my fault. I know what to look for now; I promise, it won’t happen again.”

Draven sighs, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “I wish I could blame just you, Miss Erso,” he says, and Jyn’s too surprised by the honesty to be mad. “But, truthfully, it’s my fault. Your lack of control and Captain Andor’s lack of experience are a volatile combination. I should never have let you Drift.”

“You’re wrong,” Jyn says. “And I’m not Drifting with anybody else.”

Cassian’s head snaps up.

Draven just nods. “I thought you might say that.”

“So, what?” Jyn asks. “You’re grounding us?”

“Yes,” Draven says. “Until I’m convinced you can control the Drift, neither one of you is getting back in that Jaeger.”

“What happened to needing us?” Jyn demands. “Can you really afford to leave us on the bench?”

“You are dismissed,” Draven says, as if she hadn’t spoken. “Both of you.”

Cassian practically bolts from the room. Jyn’s chest aches, but she doesn’t follow him. One thing she learned at the Jaeger Academy: never back down. Never show weakness. “With all due respect, _sir_ ,” she bites out. “This is bullshit. You said it yourself; this is our last chance to stop the kaiju. You need us.”

“What I _need_ , Miss Erso,” Draven says, his eyes hard and icy, “is for you to learn how to _control yourself_.” He pushes himself up from the chair. Jyn stands her ground. “You’re sloppy. You always have been. When we had a dozen Jaegers, that was good enough. When we weren’t facing our last, best chance to stop the total extinction of the human race, that was good enough. It’s not anymore.” He pauses. “You’re right, I do need you. I need _Partisan Rebel_ to get that bomb into the Breach. But I do not need you badly enough that I’m willing to torpedo our final opportunity to win this war. So, Miss Erso, I would suggest that you do your best to convince me that you do, in fact, have it under control. Do I make myself clear?”

Jyn’s palms hurt where her fingernails have dug into the skin. She bites back a dozen acerbic replies, all too aware that if she lets them out, if she lets her temper get the better of her, he wins. “Crystal,” she manages, finally.

“Good.” Draven deflates a little. For an instant, he doesn’t look like the hardass General. He just looks tired. “Dismissed, Miss Erso.”

This time, Jyn leaves.

\--

Even in the driving rain, the streets of the Bone Slums are crowded with people. The cacophony of horns and voices calling out in different languages drown out the pattering sound of water hitting the street. Above the heads of the crowd, neon signs crowd the skyline. Among them, the dark, stark silhouettes of a long-dead kaiju’s ribcage jut up into the sky.

For once, Artoo Deetu’s short stature actually helps rather than hinders him. He’s able to easily duck under the ever-present threat of umbrellas. Which is good, since his head is throbbing more than enough as it is.

He’d thought he understood the kaiju. Hadn’t he spent years dissecting them, learning their biology, the fundamental building blocks of how their bodies worked? He could almost laugh now, thinking of his certainty just a few hours before. He’d never understood the kaiju at all. Never understood that they weren’t just simple predators, stumbling onto a new hunting ground through some inexplicable accident of spacetime. They have a _purpose_. They were sent here to do one very specific thing: exterminate the human race.

And, if he’s honest with himself, they’re doing a pretty good job of it.

“Artoo? Artoo, where did you go?”

Artoo turns, but with the throng of people around him he can’t quite spot where Threepio’s voice is coming from. Instead, he slides past a couple of passersby to a set of stairs, climbs up two or three, and sticks his UV flashlight in the air, waving it. He takes the moment to get his bearings. After a moment, he picks the street sign out from the crowded background: _Fong_ and _Tal_. He’s in the right place.

Threepio finds him soon enough, puffing a little from exertion. “Do you even know where we’re going?”

 _I’m working on it_ , Artoo signs.

“That’s reassuring,” Threepio says. Artoo frowns. Threepio’s gotten awfully sarcastic lately. He blames Tuesso, personally.

It’s not worth arguing about. Artoo checks the symbol on the card Draven had given him, and starts to search. It’s not long before he finds the first matching mark on a stanchion blocking off a street for pedestrians.

 _See?_ he signs.

Threepio just sighs.

They follow the symbols up onto a crowded pedestrian overpass. The trail ends at a shady-looking shop on a corner with a couple of decidedly suspicious looking men loitering outside.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Threepio asks, eying the men uncertainly.

Artoo shrugs. What choice do they really have?

They go inside. The men follow them. Artoo pretends not to notice.

The inside of the shop is stacked with jars, bottles, and other small containers with spidery, handwritten labels. Artoo’s written Chinese isn’t great, but even he can recognize the word all the labels have in common: kaiju.

“Can I interest you in some kaiju bone powder?” says the man behind the counter.

It snaps Artoo out of his dazed contemplation of just how many different things one can apparently make out of a kaiju. He turns, shaking his head, and gestures to Threepio.

“Oh, ah…” Threepio glances nervously at the men near the door. “We’re looking for Orson Krennic.”

Artoo holds out the card Draven gave him helpfully, flashing the front with his flashlight to show the symbol.

The man gestures to the thugs by the door. The lock clicks shut. Artoo moves a little closer to Threepio. He tells himself it’s to help keep Threepio calm, and that’s mostly the truth.

“Krennic, eh?” the man says, stepping out from behind the counter. He chuckles as he crosses to run his hand across one of the shelves, and the wall rumbles open in response. Beyond is a dim hallway lined with shelves full of jars, their contents glowing eerie shades of green and yellow. “Good luck.”

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Threepio moans under his breath.

Artoo’s not about to be scared off by a hallway full of what are obviously preserved kaiju parts. If anything, it just proves they’re in the right place.

Beyond the hallway is an opulent room, the walls done in rich gold and red tones. Artoo notices this only vaguely; he’s way more interested in what’s on the tables lining the walls. It takes a second for it to click, just because he’s not used to seeing it all in one place like this. Then it does, and Artoo realizes this isn’t a shady black market shop.

This is _paradise_.

There’s a lymph gland from a Category 2 hanging in a tank, perfectly preserved. At a table, a man carefully polishes what appears to be a cuticle, while another walks past holding—is that a skin parasite? He’d never heard of them outliving their hosts before! He chases this last man, peering curiously at the tank they’re putting the parasites in.

“I’m sure you’re wondering how we keep them alive,” a strange voice says from behind him, smugness dripping from every word.

Artoo turns; standing there is a gray haired man in—Artoo does a double-take—an ostentatious white cape, smiling in a way that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. Threepio hasn’t quite caught up, so Artoo nods.

The man tuts. “That’s a trade secret, I’m afraid.”

“I apologize for Artoo,” Threepio says as he finally arrives, leaning hard on his cane. “He can be a bit—well, excitable.”

The man waves a hand. “No, not at all. Admirers of my work are always welcome.” The smile slips, just a little. “That being said, we are very busy. Who, exactly, are you?”

“My name is Cee Threepio,” Threepio says, his hand tightening on his cane in the way it always does when he’s too nervous to wring them together. “This is Artoo Deetu. We’re looking for Orson Krennic?”

“You’ve found him,” Krennic says. “Who told you where to find me?”

“Well—“ Threepio says, and cuts off when Artoo smacks his arm lightly. Artoo signs, and Threepio reluctantly translates, “I’m afraid that’s classified.”

One of Krennic’s eyebrows creeps ever so slightly upward. “Is that so?” He sweeps his cape out of the way to rest his hand on his hip. “That’s a shame.” Beneath his hand, peeking out from a hip holster, is the butt of a gun.

“Artoo,” Threepio says nervously.

Artoo rolls his eyes, but he nods.

“General Davits Draven told us you might have something we need,” Threepio says immediately, relieved. Artoo obligingly produces the card from his pocket and shows it to Krennic.

The man glances at the card, sniffs, and removes his hand from his hip to wave it in the air. “Yes, fine. Enough chat. As I said, we’re very busy, so tell me: what is it you’ve come for?”

\--

“I’m still not sure what the big deal is,” Kay says absently, his attention split as always between what he’s saying and the notepad full of calculations he’s currently doing with the hand not holding his fork. “Surely pilots have chased the RABIT before. Why else would they have such a… quaint name for it?”

“That’s not the point,” Cassian says. He pushes his food around his tray, but can’t quite bring himself to eat any of it. Not with shame and disappointment curdling in his stomach.

Before Kay can answer, a strange hush falls over the cafeteria. The hairs on the back of Cassian’s neck prickle. Almost before he even realizes it, he looks up.

Across the heads of the crowd, Jyn Erso meets his eyes.

After a moment, the chatter slowly starts up again. Cassian pushes himself to his feet. “I’ll see you later, Kay.”

He finally looks up at that, his eyebrows furrowing. “But I haven’t told you what moronic thing Deetu’s done now.”

“Later,” Cassian says, and makes his escape.

They settle on the scaffolding near where _Partisan Rebel_ stands ready. For a while, they sit in a silence that seems to Cassian like shouldn’t be as comfortable as it is. But then again, however briefly, they were in each other’s heads. After that, how awkward could a silence between them be? So he doesn’t try to make small talk, and Jyn doesn’t either. They just watch the sparks from welders all over _Partisan’s_ body.

“I should’ve warned you,” Jyn says eventually. “I’m sorry.”

Cassian shakes his head. “I should’ve known better. Chasing the RABIT… it’s a rookie mistake.”

“You don’t get it,” she says, quiet but firm. “You weren’t just getting my memories. You were getting Saw’s, too. We were connected when he died.”

“I know,” Cassian says, just as quiet. “I felt it.”

A muscle in Jyn’s jaw tenses as she swallows hard, but she manages a hint of a smile. “It doesn’t matter how many sim drops you’ve done or textbooks you’ve read. Nothing prepares you for that.”

Cassian hesitates. “I remember… it was so empty.”

Jyn nods once, sharply. “Turns out, when you share a head for so long, the hardest thing to deal with is the hole that’s left behind.” She crumbles a leftover piece of breadcrumb between her fingers, looking out at _Partisan_. The light from the distant welders catches in her eyes like stars in the night sky. “I was worried,” she admits. “I didn’t know if I’d be able to deal with it. Having someone there again.”

He knows all this already; he’s seen inside her head, just as she’s seen in his. But that’s exactly why he doesn’t interrupt. It’s important to her that she say this out loud.

She’s quiet for another long moment, then she turns and smiles again, more genuine this time. “I’m glad I was wrong.”

He smiles back. “I’m telling Draven you said that.”

She laughs. “You wouldn’t dare.”

The retort on his lips dies unspoken, interrupted by the sudden deafening blare of klaxons and eye-searing flash of red warning lights.

Jyn’s on her feet almost before Cassian realizes what’s happening. He scrambles up after her, and she turns, eyes wild. “Is that what I think it is?”

He nods, grim. “It’s the Breach.”

A moment later, the familiar female voice blares. _All Jaeger pilots report to LOCCENT at once. All pilots to LOCCENT at once._

They run.


End file.
